Gilbert Adair

Born in Northern Ireland, Gilbert Adair has lived and written poetry in London, Singapore, New York, and Hawaii. In 1980 cofounded, and for the next twelve years curated, Sub-Voicive, a series of experimental poetry readings that ran in tandem with Eric Mottram’s King’s College readings; also a cofounder & member mid-80s of the New River Project, which hosted events of poetry, visual arts, music, dance. Left London in 1992; now based in Kauai and teaching at Kauai Community College. Author to date of fourteen books of poetry, the two most recent (and best) from Veer: xiangren (2007) and sable smoke (2010). Currently working on a formal/geographical translation of Blake’s Milton.

If we push the uncritical romantic views of the outsider artist aside, it’s difficult not to read Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal as embodying the dynamics of an abuse narrative. His epic uses multiple mediums: newspaper clippings, stenciled drawings, watercolor paintings, and narrative fiction to depict a child slave rebellion against their Glandelinian overlords. The heroines of Darger’s allegory of Christian martyrdom are the Vivian girls, rendered by the author in a range of disturbing, one-dimensional fashions: the girls are shown, by turns, adventuring through idyllic, Edwardian landscapes, and falling prey to the grotesqueries of absolute violence, hanged in a field or strangled. Notable is that Darger often draws male genitalia on the little girls, a fact overlooked by many as mere curiosity. John Ashbery encountered Darger’s work in the 1990s and this encounter inspired the corresponding long poem, Girls on the Run. In Darger’s simplistic world, the girls are unquestionably moral and good and the author gives them no room to deviate from their characterization, which feels particularly misogynistic.

If we push the uncritical romantic views of the outsider artist aside, it’s difficult not to read Henry Darger’s In the Realms of the Unreal as embodying the dynamics of an abuse narrative. His epic uses multiple mediums: newspaper clippings, stenciled drawings, watercolor paintings, and narrative fiction to depict a child slave rebellion against their Glandelinian overlords.